Full Comment’s Araminta Wordsworth brings you a daily round-up of quality punditry from across the globe. Today: Money can’t buy you love, but a certain amount can make you happy, right?

Two scientists from Princeton University study say $75,000 is the sweet spot. Having more doesn’t make enough difference to be worth it. That’s why billionaires like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates aren’t leaving everything to their children.

Try telling that to the Rausings, the super-rich Swedish family whose patriarch invented the Tetra Pak container. His heirs moved to Britain to escape Sweden’s punitive taxes and there their wealth gave them entrée to the highest circles, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Prince Charles, heir to the British throne.

Now, Hans Kristian Rausing, grandson of the founder and one of Britain’s richest men, is being held over the murder of his wife Eva, who seemingly died of a drug overdose. The Prince expressed sorrow at her death.

Despite their riches, the gilded couple struggled to carve out meaningful roles for themselves, although establishing several charities. Perhaps their relationship was doomed from the start: they both came from wealthy families and met in rehab.

Their drug problem became public in 2008, when Eva was caught at a U.S. embassy reception with crack cocaine and heroin in her handbag. It could have been a wake-up call, but controversially the authorities decided not to prosecute — leniency that would not have been extended to a working-class crack addict.

After that, it was pretty much downhill. As Harry Mount notes in The Daily Telegraph, it’s hard being rich and bored:

Poor Eva Rausing, who was found dead this week, was the daughter of a rich American Pepsi-Cola executive who multiplied her fortune — and her troubles — a thousand times, with her marriage to Hans Kristian Rausing, joint heir to the £4.5-billion [$7.1-billion] Tetra Pak fortune. It didn’t help that they met in rehab. As they don’t teach you in maths lessons in smart [private] schools, Predisposition Towards Drugs + Limitless Cash = Big Trouble. There is a third element to the equation: too much playtime. It’s the drugs that actually shut down the body; but it’s the relentless dreariness of one empty day after another, with nothing to do – except the odd charity ball committee meeting and the forever unfinished screenplay – that buttresses the need for drugs.

Nick Barton, head of the Rausing-established charity Action on Addiction, hopes some good will come of Eva’s untimely demise.

Inevitably, Eva’s death draws attention to addiction and not just because of her philanthropy. If any good is to come from the tragedy, it is perhaps that we may take another step towards a rational discussion of addiction. Prurient sensationalising and trivialising of this destructive condition does nobody any good. Maybe it will help us realise that as human beings we are all potentially susceptible to the grip of an addiction. Maybe it will help lessen the harmful power of the stigma of addiction. But we can still celebrate a wonderful legacy. Eva helped make a real difference to the lives of many suffering people from all walks of life both in the UK and abroad. One can only admire and say thank you.

At The Guardian, Stuart Jefferies suggests it doesn’t help that Hans K.’s sisters, Sigrid and Lisbet, are “women with money, brains and purpose” who have successfully melded riches and active useful lives.

As for Hans K. Rausing, papers claimed that he was psychically wounded early on in life because he was intimidated by a 6ft 8in billionaire namesake of a father whose business acumen he could never equal. It was this sense of inadequacy that drove him to run off to India as a young man, where he lived rough and reportedly indulged in what the tabloids have described as a life of “hippy hedonism”, often in that magnet for the putatively counter-cultural wastrel, Kathmandu … [He] has been portrayed as monosyllabic and vacant, socially maladroit and incessantly watching telly. In photographs he appears bearded and burly, like Joaquin Phoenix towards the end of the movie I’m Still Here. He has had no vocation or hobbies, apart, perhaps, from amassing an international property portfolio from his trust fund.

The Daily Mail’s Kathy Gyngell believes Hans K. and Eva were enabled by Britain’s drug culture, which allowed to pursue their hedonistic lifestyle in a way that would not have been tolerated in Sweden.

Despite the public outrage [after the embassy incident], Prince Charles was quick to give his public support to Eva Rausing. His spurious defence was that his charities gave a second chance to young drug addicts. So why not therefore to Mrs. Rausing? That she already had had endless chances and that they had hardly proved to be the solution to her problem seemed to escape him … And it is not just Prince Charles who is guilty of it. The great and good in Britain have encouraged such toleration of drugs, from [Rowan Williams] the misguided Archbishop of Canterbury downwards. Not only has he supported more toleration but is quoted on the back of the Transform Policy Foundation’s “Blueprint” for legalisation. Transform is a lobby funded in part by The Open Society, itself funded by George Soros, that campaigns single mindedly for the legalisation and normalisation of all drugs.

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